Jacqueline C. Rineer

Monthly Archives: June 2014

Everyday I go to work. Everyday, I sit down at a desk among people who don’t think the way I do, or see things the way I do. I sit in the midst of people who are special to someone and have have those who are special to them. People who have traveled different roads and have endured different trials. They all believe one thing or another, of that I am certain…although some, I’m sure, maybe most, believe in nothing at all. But I sit there everyday, as a Christian, albeit silently.

There is a certain uneasiness that comes with this job because of that. It’s undeniable and it breathes down my neck every second I am here. Their words make me think. They post over the group chat things that cause me to wonder and wander away, even just a little, from what I know in my heart. “I need to check this out.”, I think.

I like to learn. I like to know things. I have an aching need to analyze everything around me: “There’s another post. I have new information that I have to run through the machine to verify or nullify. Here it goes.” As weird as it may sound, that’s how I operate. I’m always and forever trying to prove my Christianity wrong.

At the age of 19 I was attending my second year of college before deciding to change career paths. That was the first time I remember thinking for myself. I had met a new friend named Sarah and after talking with her, exchanging theories on the spirit world and people that claim to see the future, I told her that I believed in God. She was indifferent, as most people are, and she told me her thoughts. I couldn’t respond. Suffice it to say she had me in corner. Things had happened in her life that I could not explain…I had no answers and then I started thinking. To this day, I believe that she had a very important purpose in my life: to make me doubt.

I believe that doubt itself is one of the worst feelings one can feel. My co-workers and I were experiencing doubt at the loss of a job and the uncertainty of losing a steady pay check. Doubt can literally make you sick, especially when you doubt something you lean your life on, I should know. I admit to doubting my beliefs on a regular basis, which is agonizing. I roll my thoughts over and over in my mind. I read. I research. I do whatever I can when I have the slightest doubt to make absolutely sure that I’m wrong and prove with out a doubt that He’s not real – and that they’re right. But then something beautiful happens. I can’t.

There are many reasons for my believing what I do. The most compelling of which, surprisingly the things that I can’t research – the things science can’t touch. Never mind the creation vs. evolution debate or the flood, or even the speed at which the universe expanded from a single point. And no, my “warm fuzzy feeling” is not my proof either. My proof lies in the glory that comes when I try to prove my faith wrong and can’t. The fact that there IS doubt about being no God is beautiful in itself, because there’s always the possibility, if nothing else, that there’s something in existence that’s greater than us.

After I complicate my reasoning as much as I can, I find that I always come back to simple things that ground my beliefs and make me sure, once again, that I know them to be true. They are the things that can’t be proven or seen or explained. Things that, if they weren’t written down in the Bible, we may not even have a simple understanding of them.

I took me awhile to figure out that God does an awful lot of talking in the Bible. Growing up, nobody really showed me the Old Testament, they just sort of skimmed it; of course, I knew it was there, but I didn’t know what it contained. When I found out what was written on those pages, I saw another side to a God I thought I knew. In those words, I saw Him tenderly calling out to perpetually wandering nation to love Him, the heartbreak that must have come from having to judge that nation, and the cycle beginning again. The pattern, I realized, was simple: A loving, yet holy God, loving without restraint – pouring love on a people that said they loved Him, but turned from Him again and again. Yes, I saw judgement, which is the thing that on one likes about God, but I also saw love and pursuit for nation, and later a world that wanting nothing to do with Him.

Love. After that evening standing out under the slowly appearing stars on the college campus, I had a thought: Do I believe this for me?

I have to reaffirm the answer to that question over and over. I never stop searching for a light in the darkness – even if, one day, it means that the light is not something I want to see. But I don’t think that will be the case.

I’ve been inexplicably protected from plenty of car accidents, and other incidents that might have been.
I’ve been held back from doing things or going places, only to find out something terrible would have happened.
I’ve been through struggles that I later learned were for my good.
I’ve had very specific prayers answered; I believe that my husband is the result of one such prayer.

Those among many others are just a few reasons that I’ve been unable disprove my beliefs – because I cannot begin to explain any of the above. All I can imagine from that is that someone (or something) is watching me, listens to me, and loves me.

As for me, I know whom I believe. I doubt. I do. And I have bouts of trying to ignore it and live me life my own way. But I don’t think He minds. The same persistent, glorious love I read about throughout the Bible is the same that I am greeted by every time I recover from the darkness of doubt. He welcomes me back with an outstretched hand as if to say, “Are you ready to stop wandering and thinking and just be still and know?” To which I sheepishly reply, “Yes.”